fauren

Right. Let's try this again.

Deerhoof - Frenzied Handsome, Hello! (buy)

Hi. Remember me, Internets? Once upon a time I made a New Year's resolution to be religious about blog upkeep in 2008, but I have failed miserably in recent months. Let's chalk it up to such wonderfulness as trips home to visit my new niece, beautiful weddings in the Catskills, hours and hours of baseball watching (oh, dear Sox, you battled bravely), birthday celebrating, and so much cooking I couldn't even decide what to blog about.

I've spent the last few weeks performing some variation of the Supermarket Sweep at the small Greenmarkets in my neighborhood, squeezing the last goodness from them before they disappear at Thanksgiving for the subsequent six months. My CSA share also ends at the end of this month, and I know I will really miss it. Our refrigerator has been filled to brimming with lettuce, chard, kale, mizuna, spinach, carrots, beets, eggplants, radishes, potatoes, tomatoes, bok choy, herbs, kholrabi, celeriac, squash, broccoli... you get the picture.

I don't anticipate the dreary winter months with much enthusiasm food-wise, but at the same time I kind of relish the challenge of rising early on a Saturday, bundling up, and walking to Grand Army Plaza (our only year-round Greenmarket in these parts) to hunt for exciting and unknown items among those root vegetables and squashes and such that seem to define local winter eating.

Until then, I have some summery recipes that might feel late in coming now that New York City is hovering close to its first frost, but some things are just so good that it feels wrong to wait another eight months before posting them.

Adieu to a beautiful summer.

(Dan and I scarfing some soft serve. Coney Island, August. Photo by Ryan McManus.)

Edible, Audible

It's impossible to count the number of afternoons I spent in my room when I was younger, lying on the floor in front of my stereo with tapes and CDs strewn around me, composing what I swore every time was going to be the perfect mixtape. The first few were rough -- songs taped off the radio caught DJs mid-sentence, the transitions between tracks popped where I'd pressed stop and then record again, the last song on a side got cut off where I'd overestimated how much time was left. I like to think I got better at it over the years.

(On the beach in Westport, MA)

I distinctly remember thinking in early high school that it would be SO COOL if someone invented a thing that let you make your own CDs instead of tapes. Really, what a novel idea. I still have the first CD mix I ever made, composed in the attic computer room of my friend Al's house when we were probably 16. I believe it's called something incredibly lame like "Yummy Tunes" and has a picture of cherries on the cover and a chocolate covered strawberry on the inside. While my musical tastes might have been a little misguided at that age, that CD actually resonates quite a bit for me even now -- it was probably the first time I consciously linked food and music.

The trouble with writing a blog on a single subject is that it doesn't always allow a person to speak to her other interests. This is hard for me, since right up there next to food in the list of Things That Mean A Whole Lot To Lauren is music. The two actually fit nicely together in my non-digital life -- I hardly ever cook without a soundtrack -- but figuring out how to join the two here has been a little tricky.

So today begins an experiment. You could call it my new mixtape project, I guess, and it's based on the intersection of my two most pronounced forms of consumption. Not all these songs have to do with food per se, but I'll try my best to explain what is going on in my head when I share what I do. (Just be forewarned that, a lot of times, there is no explanation for what goes on in my head.)

If it can be considered as such, the honor of the first song posted here at Fauren goes to Elvis Perkins, who I had the incredible pleasure of seeing (in the form of Elvis Perkins in Dearland) live in Prospect Park this past Friday evening. I couldn't possibly do their set justice in words, but suffice it to say that it moved me to make music a part of this blog.

Happy listening. Happy cooking.

Elvis Perkins - While You Were Sleeping (buy)

Dinner at Blue Hill, or: How I Learned What It Must Be Like To Be A Famous Person

It used to be I was just a glutton and that was that, but now I'm a glutton with a web site. Writing a food blog is a funny thing... all is well and good when I've got my foodie hat on, but when I'm wearing my "it's 10pm, I haven't eaten dinner, and all I have in my kitchen is some coffee ice cream, a packet of garam masala spices, and that jar of sugar-free candies my dentist gave me for my birthday" hat, I can't help but feel like a bit of a fraud when I get on the phone to the local Chinese place and order up some of those pork dumplings drenched in sesame sauce. Especially because that sesame sauce is probably just melted Skippy peanut butter.

Blogging about food also breeds the compulsion to photograph whatever I eat - if people can't taste what I'm talking about, they should at least be able to look at it, right? But this can be problematic, too. For one, most of my family and friends think it's weird. Also, there's no way to be subtle about taking photographs of my plate in the middle of a restaurant (and consequently, strangers also think it's weird).

Deciding to leave the camera at home can be hard sometimes, especially when it means that it'll take me more than a week to find just the right words to describe a particularly stellar meal, but that's exactly what's happened since Dan and I were lucky enough to enjoy a seven-course tasting menu at Blue Hill last Tuesday night.

Dear Internet: It's not you, It's Me. I Swear.

Dear readers,

This post has been a long time coming (clearly, if you've been checking back and hoping for any sort of regular updates), so apologies for taking so darn long to finally do it.

Fauren is a hobby of mine, a labor of love that I've begun with my spare time.  As these things sadly happen, my spare time has dwindled with the final push of my last semester of graduate school as well as some personal goings-on, and my hobbies have suffered as a result. 

I keep saying to friends that I never understood how blogging could be a full-time profession until I started one myself and realized how much work goes into making it something worth visiting and reading.  Now that I know, let me say I have a whole new appreciation for it.  Clearly I have some work to do in striking the right balance between Life and The Internet.

That said, I am officially declaring a hiatus for Fauren until the end of my semester in mid-May.  Between finals and the job hunt, there sadly won't be much time to dedicate to blogging until then.

In the meantime, feel free to check out the archives and visit some links, drop me a line and let me know if you've got any interesting tidbits you feel like sharing, or, you know, HIRE ME.  I will be back in full force soon enough, getting excited for summer produce and preparing myself for this year's Eat Local Challenge.

I hope you'll come back and visit me then.

Eat well,
Fauren 

Gravy Wishes and Cranberry Dreams

The car is packed and ready to hit the road when I finish my three-hour work day tomorrow.  I'm off to my parents' house for my favorite holiday.  I've been slow to update around here, thanks mostly to school, but these next few days will be a welcome break from all that.  It'll give me a chance to catch you all up on a few things, not the least of which is the conference, which was amazing.  I also indulged in some homemade pear, plum, and fig pie with hazelnut crust at a friend's house last night.  What a way to kick off the most gluttonous week of the year...

More soon.  Happy almost Thanksgiving, everyone.

Technical Difficulties, or: Foodie Not Techie

My apologies, dear readers.  The two-day downtime of Fauren was 100% my stupid fault.  There may still be some glitches to work out, so please send me an email if things seem to be out of whack.  I will try my best to be on top of it.

In the Beginning...

Dear Friends,

I have decided to revamp Fauren in favor of something more productive than a vanity blog.

The seeds were planted (so to speak) for this idea over a year ago, when I read Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire back to back.  The books sparked two things in me that had been latent since moving away from home, which are the influences of my parents' green thumbs and my mom's magic in the kitchen.   And actually, the two really go hand in hand.

Ever since I can remember, 9 months of weekends at our home in Massachusetts were spent with my mom and dad in the yard, weeding, watering, turning soil, raking, mowing, composting, planting, and replanting.  During the other three, my mom's "plant babies" germinated and grew up from their little discs of soil under grow lights in the basement laundry room.  So many delicious things came out of those gardens; we always had fresh herbs (African Blue basil was my favorite), and one summer my mom grew so many tomatoes that she was giving them away as gifts for even the most trivial occasions.  We savored the rest in green salads, in fresh panzanella, or just on their own.

I didn't learn to appreciate my mother's cooking until much later than I ought to have, and I certainly didn't understand the lengths to which she went to cook for us from the most elemental ingredients, instead of taking any number of Hamburger Helper shortcuts.  Now, of course, I am a destitute graduate student without the luxury of a mother to cook for her any longer, so I think back on these meals as nothing short of masterpieces.

But what use is it, really, to long for those salad days? (genius!)

I may not be able to do much about the urge to garden, seeing as I live in Brooklyn with no outdoor space to call my own,  but just the opposite is true of cooking.  Not only do I finally have an apartment with a room large and well-equipped enough to actually be called a kitchen (none of this galley stuff they've got going on in Manhattan), I also happen to live in Park Slope, where the options for a foodie are nearly endless.  There are exceptions, of course, but the restaurants, farmer's markets, and even bodegas offer a lot of options and ideas you won't find in many other places.

On top of all this, I can thank my mother for giving me a palate.  My cooking skills might need some work, but at least I'll be able to taste when I've finally done something right, and aren't the best victories often the tiniest?

So it is with all of this in mind (and thensome) that I embark on this new blog of mine, in which I plan on running the gamut of food experiences: recipes, tips, restaurant reviews, innovations, successes, failures, and all things in between.  There are a lot of things informing the way I order, shop for, cook, and/or eat my food these days that maybe you'll find helpful and interesting too, but there is time for all of that. 

For now, I just want to welcome you to the new Fauren, and I hope you'll stick around.